getting a user's home dir (sed/awk?)

[Erik Norgaard]

Hi:

I am trying to create a script, the idea is to host a number of web
services, each running as a different process owned by a different user
bound to a non privileged port on localhost. The point is that each
service can be restarted without affecting other services and that any
security compromise does not propagate to other services.

Now, to start all servers I want to create a master script that looks up
the user's home directory and runs a script in a predefined path.

So the question is: given a username, how do I get the homedir?

I have found "pw usershow user1" will return a line from the passwd
file, but that needs to be split chewed, and spit out. Seems awk can do
it but I have no clue.

Thanks, Erik

PS: Yes, I know, I could just create a perl script - but this time I
want to do it all using the tools in base.
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